


putting the romance in necromancer (where only dandelions grow)

by eternitas



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: M/M, Mysterious, Mystery, Necromancy, Small Towns, Surreal, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 09:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28741245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternitas/pseuds/eternitas
Summary: Everyone says he’s strange, that Arthur.
Relationships: America/England (Hetalia)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	putting the romance in necromancer (where only dandelions grow)

**Author's Note:**

> written as my variation on the idea “necromancer arthur”
> 
> some talk of religion

He used to say nothing good could live here, and by the tone he used and the way he would tilt, subtly, his head every time he said so, Alfred began to think it was true: that nothing good could live here (the sky perpetually gray, the sky so motionless no poets could write about it). And if it was true, and if nothing good could really live here, then he was content to follow Arthur into a second death where they could let decay take them and take them until only the certainty of their bones remained, rotted so close no one could ever tell them apart, and rotted so tenderly no one could pry them away from one another lest they both return unto dust.

It has begun to rain, the effluvia-stained graveyard waking with a sound like a dirge played for a lifetime.

* * *

“You’re so sweet,” Arthur had told him the night before. His eyes were clouded over, his pupils dilated. He ran his fingers through and through and through Alfred’s damp hair, prying open his mouth like an animal to feel the warmth inside.

“What a sweet boy. Aren’t you a sweet boy? Just yesterday. I held you and I held you and you never said a thing… sweet boy. I could die one thousand deaths and I would come back to this, my sweet boy. Just yesterday you were digging through the garden. Because you were hungry, weren’t you? And you wouldn’t even talk to me. Naughty boy. Wouldn’t talk to me…”

* * *

They’re walking through the graveyard. 

Behind Alfred a branch snaps, falls. 

A murder of crows, scattering.

* * *

Arthur tells him he had been twenty, two years younger than himself. Was it an accidental death? Manslaughter? Well, it had been a—a car, the driver was drunk, the news swarmed all the papers relentlessly. There had been no survivors.

“Except you,” he murmurs, caressing Alfred’s face. “Except you, except you, my beautiful pearl.”

* * *

Alfred sits on a gravestone. He tries to remember the song Arthur likes to sing as he works and finds he can’t get past the first two lines. In the background Arthur picks dandelions, silent.

* * *

Imagine a room. Its construction is unimportant, and its origin. Imagine a room.

It is empty, comprised of nothing but straight lines, disconnected from everything but itself. Nothing but insides. Imagine you grew up in this room, idle all day in its pristine corners, your meals passed through a slot in the door, yourself never able to determine the time outside of estimates based on the color and shape of the light. 

Imagine an aching vividness is bleeding into the corners of the room. Maybe it’s the sun, or maybe it is just a joke.

This is what revival feels like, or so he tells me.

* * *

The path home is almost the same. There are no crows anywhere.

* * *

“Drink this,” Arthur says, and passes him a mug. They’re in his cabin. A shovel leans against the wall, his mud-caked boots beside them.

“It’s dandelion tea.”

Alfred takes it and drinks. Bitter.

“It’s good,” he tells Arthur, who smiles like his face will split open with the effort.

In the night he dreams they’re in a meadow where only dandelions grow, caught on infinite loop in a cycle of wilt and blooming. He can’t see Arthur’s face from this angle. He calls out and Arthur turns to him, opens his mouth. Black sludge tumbles out forever, from his lips, from his eye sockets. More holes open up in his skin, his face, his face, new holes generating as old ones expand, until the torrent of sludge eclipses his sunken head.

Alfred tries to scream but dandelions have grown in his throat.

* * *

He wakes up before Arthur does.

* * *

“Hush hush hush… it’s okay, Alfred… you can cry as much as you’d like…”

* * *

_Dream extraction is a widespread practice in certain parts of the world. I will not tell you which parts these are. Even today effective dream extraction cannot be performed by ordinary civilians, but magicians practicing at a level which enables them to summon minor familiars (rats, frogs, large and invasive insects) are best able to achieve an approximation of success. It is said that extracting a dream from a loved one functions as a kind of shared experience, a mutual psychedelic spiral into the most haunted or haunting reserves of human memory._

Alfred shuts the book and stares at the wall, bewildered.

* * *

Next morning, close to noon. On the street. Alfred’s limbs seize up again, beginning with the legs, ascending to the arms: he shudders, he falls twitching to the ground. Rigor mortis.

Arthur is not a skilled enough necromancer to prevent this kind of embarrassment from happening with startling frequency, but he is shameless enough to brush away the scrutiny of onlookers and press his glowing palms to Alfred’s chest.

_suus affinis praemittere arrogō violentia figūra venēficium_

Alfred comes up with a gasp, like someone emerging from deep underwater.

“Welcome back,” Arthur says. “I’ve missed you.”

* * *

Everyone says he’s strange, that Arthur, as though a gentle creature has rotted between his heart and his ribcage.

Everyone says he must get lonely, that Arthur, living as out of the way as he does.

Everyone says he’s a perfectly kind boy, that Arthur.

* * *

He thinks of Arthur’s eyes. (They’re the eyes of a kind boy.) He thinks of Arthur’s hands, long-fingered, calloused, the way they move as he arranges the flowerpots on the windowsill.

He feels a certain emotion but it is uncertain what this emotion is.

* * *

The librarian tells Alfred a story about Arthur sending her his baking when she was pregnant, her voice like an illusion.

* * *

Alfred wonders why he hasn’t ever seen this town on maps.

* * *

Alfred wakes up with someone else’s tooth inside his mouth.

* * *

He hears Arthur chanting, low and steady, and sneaks around the corner to peer into his study. What lies on the table before him is obstructed by the long shadow of his body, and it is flailing, and it is howling.

Alfred buries his face in his hands, breathing in and holding and breathing out and breathing in and holding and breathing out until he feels better.

The next morning, Arthur hums dreamily through breakfast.

“I have a surprise for you,” he says.

Arthur leads him to that same room into which he has forbidden all entry and gestures at—

—at a grayhound, barely moving, foggy moon-eyes, white fluid dripping endlessly from its jaw.

But Alfred does not see any of this. He sees the scars over its abdomen, the tattered collar circling its ripped-up neck and embroidered with a name (the hiss of the T, the gape of the O…) that he still whispers to himself whenever he is lonely, or afraid.

“Thank you,” he says, and feels something very delicate stir in him, then.

* * *

Nights, Arthur steals into the room where he sleeps, lingering in the doorway for the length of an imaginary sunset. He’ll step closer when he knows absolutely that Alfred isn’t awake.

Alfred is a light sleeper.

* * *

It is always the same thing:

His footsteps don’t echo.

His breathing fogs up the room like heat without reprieve, stifling, impossible to ignore.

He kisses Alfred’s forehead and cheeks and lips and the turn of his jaw.

He kisses him for a long, long time.

He settles his head against Alfred’s chest.

He sobs, and it’s all Alfred can hear.

* * *

Arthur only ever kisses him when he thinks he’s dead.

* * *

Alfred searches through the library’s microfiche, squinting down at the twelve-point print. Headlines like sick poetry.

It’s a predictable history, the course of generations suspended in glass: an explosion at the mine, 1896; the unveiling of the town hall, 1929; the appearance of a strange, writhing little god in the barn, 1952.

In 20XX a mass vanishing of people, buildings, the domain of soothsayers; ikons, crying out, fell burning to the street.

Was that last year, Alfred wonders? Or is it yet to come?

* * *

Early evening. Tony chews on cremated bones. Arthur reads from an ancient text, petting his head at intervals.

* * *

Alfred dislocates his spine. Perhaps some part of his skull has split, but Arthur had broken all the mirrors in the cabin months back (a fit of twitching rage) and Alfred is anyway too numb to move much.

As Arthur patches him up with an enchantment, applying a poultice to his spine afterward (cooing, all the while, “You silly, impetuous boy”), Alfred imagines his body breaking into two halves. Down the middle, a painless affair, coming upon him like a fever while he’s asleep. He imagines one of the selves righting itself, shaking a little to dispel the grains of dirt stuck to its skin, and walking away down the road as though nothing had happened at all.

The other self? Well, it isn’t really important.

* * *

He looks endlessly through the library’s volumes, his fingers raw and cut-up, his vision vibrating. Is the room getting smaller every time he enters? One day the walls will close in on him, he thinks. A form of subtle torture.

That the town is hiding from him its sin is a possibility so remote that even entertaining the idea becomes a kind of paranoia, and yet Alfred can’t help but cling to it desperately and relentlessly. A long time ago (never mind how long ago precisely) he had been told a story about a little boy who loved another little boy, and who spent the course of his little life searching for a flower to bring him.

“That little boy was you,” they said, “in another life.”

He used to cling, too, to this memory, desperately and relentlessly, but the longer he lives in this shambling necrotic half-existence the more pointless it seems.

* * *

In the nightly absence of the cathedral bells, all the dogs begin to howl.

* * *

Arthur has fallen asleep at his desk, his breathing gentle and scarcely audible. His hair looks so soft… 

Alfred could lean down and brush his lips across his temple, a sensation more fleeting than all the weight of the air, than what Arthur does to him. But he might spiral into obsession, then: the easy warmth of the skin, the light rain outside falling into gutters, the moths beneath the awning beating their wings against the window, the sound muffled.

He hurries back to his room.

* * *

Arthur is holding a heart.

“Oh, this thing?” he asks. “It beats once a century. That’s what the merchant told me, but I don’t know if that’s true. Either way, it’s a beautiful artifact, isn’t it? The veins like rivers, the arteries like the branches of a dying juniper. Even if it doesn’t belong to a human, even if it were a deer’s heart, a rabbit’s—I’m going crazy, you know, I can’t tell the difference anymore—I would treasure it all the same, because it is pulsing, and living, and it stains my sleeve the most beautiful shade of crimson. When I was very small, I would pluck the berries in the garden just to see them burst. It is the same primal joy I feel today, and every day of my life.”

He presses the back of his free hand to his brow, overcome.

“Oh, Christ! Oh, God! I am in love, I am in love, I am in love!”

* * *

Arthur takes him to the cathedral in the woods, built from marble and carved with designs too intricate for humans to comprehend. Heavenly bodies, sacred geometry.

“You can always leave if you want,” he supplies.

Alfred nods, not entirely comprehending. He steps through the entryway, taking note of the way the sunlight passes through a stained glass ceiling, so many colors to illuminate their unclean unworthy bodies.

The presence of a thousand others, of everyone who has ever come here.

“Who is your god?” (It doesn’t matter who asks that.)

Arthur gives a discreet smile, a carnivorous angel, thirteen rows of teeth.

“No god here, my darling,” he says. “In hell we feed the earth.”

* * *

Is this hell? 

Is this ennui?

* * *

All the dogs are gone.

* * *

Alfred listens to the carnage, hiding behind a tree.

* * *

A scuffing sound, interspersed by growls. Alfred turns slowly, impossibly slowly, slower than honey…

* * *

The person—they dig, digging their claws into the tawny sanguine-drained flesh of a deer. Their face, smeared with something terrible. In days they will return, will give the deer (slender thing, young, white spots like pear blossoms) to the earth, dandelions sprouting over its grave…

Christ, the dandelions.

Alfred:

stoops down to his knees beside them, staining his fingers, his clothes, pressing his hands to his throat and imagining it reddening. He eats, he devours. He tastes what the stranger tastes, the blood crescendoing in his ears and the eternal white noise of the wind are the same sound, it’s rotten, the taste will linger in his mouth in the manner of a nightmare long after he faints, clutching the remains of the deer like a child its mother, everything is rotten, everything is dead, everything is dead dead dying.

Alfred:

looms over them, sighing, plaintive. He mourns the deer, which the wind will turn to maggots. He touches his cheek and feels the cheek of the sinner. He opens his mouth and licks his teeth and feels the sinner’s teeth, the fangs of wolves. He touches his heart and it is not beating anymore.

Alfred:

walks away, and vows to never sleep again.

* * *

Alfred thinks back to the day he made that hole in Arthur’s garden. He had turned, abrupt, snarling, when Arthur tried to coax him back inside.

His father, too, in Alfred’s youth, had spent his days and spent his nights filling their yard to brimming with dirt from the hole he never seemed to stop digging. Alfred wanted to see what it would be like, was all.

Perhaps it was a thread of fate which compelled him, a hereditary curse, but he stopped digging the moment he raised his palms to the swollen sky and saw what he was becoming.

* * *

He should have stayed dead.

* * *

But then…

* * *

He watches Arthur in the morning with his palms raised to the swollen sky. His lips move to the music inside his head. The dew on the flowers resemble crystals, he knows, even when he can’t see them. It feels like prayer.

* * *

Arthur still goes to his room, and he knows Alfred is awake because he’ll stay in the doorway, waiting, but he won’t come any closer and he won’t leave.

One night Alfred asks, “Why are you standing in the doorway?”

Arthur only ever kisses him when he thinks he’s dead.

He kisses him now, digging his fingers into Alfred’s chest until the flesh tears.

* * *

It feels like prayer.

* * *

There is a reason the animals disappear. You know what it is already, don’t you?

* * *

Alfred returns to the cathedral alone when Arthur goes on his shopping trips. The droning of insects proliferates.

“I am calling…” he says like an afterthought: “I am calling to you…”

Behind him, someone laughs and laughs.

* * *

What happened to the little god in the barn?

* * *

“I could eat you,” Arthur coos. “I could eat you alive. I could swallow a boy like you.”

“Please don’t,” Alfred says.

* * *

He pores over the notes on Arthur’s desk and in the impression of candlelight he finds what he has suspected all along.

* * *

Arthur is asleep, or out. It doesn’t matter which.

* * *

The cabin dark, the ghosts silent. Alfred can feel his way through even without light.

On Arthur’s desk alongside the papers and the glass bottles, empty, half-empty, were keys: a first, a second, a brass third which he pocketed. It didn’t look as well as the illustration of it on Arthur’s private notes, but it will function as necessary.

He unlocks the door to the only room in the cabin whose arrangement he hasn’t yet committed to memory.

(Strangely, impossibly, he had never thought of leaving behind this, Arthur’s cabin and Arthur’s life. It isn’t as though Arthur is codependent: he resists touch when he isn’t initiating it and admits to Alfred that he used to be a man in the habit of disappearing for weeks. Why, then? Some questions even I can’t answer.)

It’s cold when Alfred finally enters—but of course it’s cold, cold and damp. Grains of dust floating. He coughs, and he keeps walking.

Keeps walking. Up to his waist in water.

Walking…

Arthur should be home by now.

Alfred imagines him stepping into the house, shaking the rain from his umbrella and hanging up his coat, hanging up his hat. It is this kind of false memory, among other false memories which he has never been in the habit of making, that makes him really ache for knowledge of his first life, himself without the brain damage of necromantic revival, able to sweep through crowds and draw attention, a persona as demanding and rough-hewn as the sun.

He feels as though the people on the street know what he doesn’t when they gesture enigmatically in his direction. What if he turned up in the night, sleeping through the howling of dogs on a church pew? He does not come from the earth. They would accept him anyway, and prepare him for the slaughter through nights and nights.

In the night…

The night of his birth. The rainstorm lashing the windows, the scent of honeysuckle as his mother held his bawling self. He likes to pretend it was just like this, a memory he can comprehend and manipulate. It’s easier this way, it’s simpler. So too the journey, and so too the destination.

He thinks he has accepted it, now, the reality of being dead.

After days and after nights, he finds a door—but it is not really a door, it is a square through which white, blinding light shines.

Alfred hesitates for days. He hesitates for nights.

He passes through, a feeling like ascension.

The room comes into focus gradually. Alfred stands within it, blinking away the tears that have come inexplicably to his eyes.

The room comes into focus. Gradually.

Gradually.

Alfred stands within it.

And in this room he FINDS

Lying with his head in Arthur’s lap, listening to the tickticktick of the clock as it alternates with the forever rain.

“I’m sorry,” Alfred forces out between sobs, his voice sounding as though someone had strangled him every day since he was born. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

Arthur hums a lullaby. Alfred has never heard it before.

“My dear…” He strokes Alfred’s hair like a lover. “Oh, my darling…”

* * *

Nothing good can live here. The flowers wilt after half a season and the trees don’t grow leaves, don’t run sap. Songbirds litter the cold-hardened earth like overturned stones, their talons curled inward.

Arthur used to say this, too. He doesn’t say it anymore. Alfred doubts but recognizes that this is because he sees Alfred as something good and bright and pure (what a joke), a kind of visionary force which turns all the violence of the world to the fleece of lambs, pacified and crying for nurture and for tenderness, something more precious than all the love he can give. (What a…)

What is Arthur? Who is Arthur? Tirelessly working, bandages about his fingers. He raises the dead and puts them back to sleep. Tony paces around his heels, watching. And Alfred, now, understands.

He is not the caretaker, and Alfred not the lamb. They chase one another through the dark endlessly and never pause for fear of losing the thrill of it all, sand through a sieve, a paper boat washed away on the progression of the river. 

Their hands touch and all the sensations are connected. Everything is connected.

It feels like something he can’t even explain.

* * *

Nothing good can live here.

But we will try, even if it kills us.


End file.
